There’s a reason why people are intimidated by the word ‘hacking’. It invokes images of groups of paunchy, sweaty men staring at computer monitors and typing at alarming speeds. In contrast, we view hacking as the pursuit of abstraction: an attempt to push beyond the physical laws, limitations, and complexities of nature; to hack is to produce abstract information and express the possibility of new worlds.
Ethical hacking is an art form that produces something new and abstract from a virtual state. These abstractions are full of unique information and produce knowledge without providing it, they pre-know without knowing and provide a space for questioning. To hack is to produce or apply the abstract to information and express the possibility of new worlds or in the case of origami, new folds. It is through the abstract that the virtual can be identified, produced, and unlocked.
When we think of art and information security, the idle mind might be in a contemplative mood, with dearest thoughts of classifying, ordering, organizing, and building a structure; values that are fundamental to the binary that orders our world. In modern times this makes us effective at managing just about every aspect of our daily lives, and yet what is the security cost of all this efficiency?
